


Penumbra

by softestlad



Series: Aaron's Family Values [3]
Category: Emmerdale
Genre: Family Feels, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Memories, family support
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-01-19
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22324777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softestlad/pseuds/softestlad
Summary: Set while Aaron is in Scotland working at Debbie's garage - Zak visits him at work, and they talk about what they've lost. And Aaron remembers.
Relationships: Aaron Dingle/Robert Sugden, aaron dingle & zak dingle
Series: Aaron's Family Values [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1606897
Comments: 10
Kudos: 45





	Penumbra

**Author's Note:**

> i've juggled some things around and turned "Aaron's Family Values" into a series, retitling the multi chapter fic it was before - those were all conversations between Aaron and family members but i was too #sad to properly include robert in them as more than a subject and absence. this is the first one where he's *properly in it* and it felt separate to me. it's still canon-ish, and still part of AFV in the tangentially connected series, but i thought this one could probably stand alone

Debbie’s new garage was pretty swish, as it went. Or at least, it made the garage in Emmerdale look like a greasy shoebox. Aaron smiled, in spite of himself, yanking to get the tire off of the car he was working on. He had a lot of memories in that greasy shoebox. It was where things could have ended for him, where some things began. Like everything in the village, he couldn’t imagine it without an attached memory of Robert floating in, making him smile or making his eyes prick. Mostly both.

Aaron rounded the car, jacked up into the air so he could get the wheels off and replace the brake pads. The thing had squealed like anything when the driver pulled up in it, so badly it had Aaron gritting his teeth. The bloke in question had tossed his keys at Aaron and all but snapped his fingers, the tosser. Some people found it so easy to talk down to someone blue collar, without the foggiest idea where they would start in the same job.

Aaron finished pulling the wheels off, got started on the replacement itself. He hadn’t been a proper mechanic in years now, but he’d always been genuinely interested in it – he still watched his Top Gear, picked up the auto magazines he favoured, worked on his and Robert’s cars himself rather than bothering Cain with them. He’d kept his skills up, and the basics were ingrained. He had wondered if coming up to help Debbie in her new place would entail a little rustiness, some humility as he endured retraining in some finer points. But it didn’t – it felt like a return. Something familiar. It had been a while since anything _familiar_ hadn’t also been _painful_ , and he found he was enjoying it.

He was finishing the job when he heard a gruff throat clear behind him.

“Alright, Zak?” Aaron said, looking over his shoulder. Zak stood, holding one hand in the other, watching Aaron as he wrapped up putting the car’s tires back on. He spat on his gloved hand to wipe a bit of grease off one of the lug nuts, purely because if Posh Prick knew Aaron’s bodily fluids had touched his precious motor he’d probably send himself into early heart failure.

“Yeah, yeah, no bother on me, lad,” Zak said, that continuous ramble of his breaking over Aaron’s back like waves. He seemed a lot smaller now to Aaron, than he used to. Not in a bad way, he assumed it was part and parcel of Aaron getting older and Zak, well, getting old. Nothing took a hero down off a plinth like growing to their height. “Brew?” Zak asked.

“Spose, yeah,” Aaron said. “You staying?”

“Thought I’d stop a mo’,” Zak said, going inside to the little office, nowhere near as small as at the Dingle garage, but still pokier than the main garage floor.

“Okay,” Aaron said, confused. He tapped his knuckles on the car’s chassis, knocking a metallic sound out of it. “Just need to bring this down and then I was due a break anyway.”

“No rush, son, no rush,” Zak said, palms out, then returned to puttering. Aaron brought the car back down, then stripped out of his gloves, wiping his hands on his overalls anyway. He followed Zak, the man having unfolded a paper from his coat somewhere, his glasses perched on his nose so he had to look down through them to read. He had a pen in hand, and Aaron realised he was doing the crossword.

“Pen?” Aaron remarked. Zak looked up, mouth opening and closing absently. He took off his glasses and laid them on the table, then pushed a tea over in Aaron’s direction as he took a seat.

“No pencils about,” Zak muttered, “I’d normally say our Debbie runs a tight ship but – “ he shook his head, clicking his tongue teasingly. Aaron smiled, small, but there. He missed Zak in the village. He missed a lot of people in the village, truth be told.

_“Pen?” Aaron asked, coming back into their bedroom with morning brews in hand, closing the door with a bump of his hip. Robert looked up, sitting up against the headboard with the paper on his knees, smiling at his husband._

_“I like to live dangerously,” he said, waggling the biro at Aaron. Aaron rolled his eyes, setting Robert’s mug on his bedside table before rounding the bed to his own side. He sat close to Robert, feeling the bare skin of his arm and chest as Robert opened up to curl his arm around him. Aaron peered at his puzzle, half complete in ambitious, no-going-back blue. He matched a few trickier words Robert had filled in to their clues, impressed at his husband’s vocabulary, but unsurprised._

_“Sparrow.”_

_“Hm?”_

_Aaron pointed at a clue with a few letters filled in. “Sparrow’d fit there.”_

_“Ah, of course.”_

_“Of course?” Aaron raised an eyebrow and sipped his tea. “What, I’d only get an obvious one, is it?”_

_“No, you’d get the one I’m stuck on,” Robert said. “Because we’re a great team.”_

_“Gag,” Aaron said, even as his chest warmed._

_“My romantic soul is wasted on you,” Robert said, lightly._

_“Superfluous,” Aaron said, pointing at another clue. “Spare, extra. Eleven letters. Superfluous.”_

_It was Robert’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you what’s superfluous,” he said, setting the paper aside and tugging at Aaron’s shirt, the morning dissolving into laughter, followed by long moans and quiet pleasures. It was only later they noticed the biro had been doing the rounds with them, scribbling blue shuddering lines on their sheets._

“Y’alright there, lad?”

“Yeah,” Aaron cleared his throat, pulling his mug towards him brusquely. “Course.”

Zak watched him a moment, and Aaron felt the prickle of discomfort that often accompanied scrutiny, even when it was well intentioned.

“So, you here for anything in particular?”

“Just thought I’d check in with you, s’all,” Zak said. “Haven’t seen you since I left, not properly. You’re looking…” Zak grumbled out a noise in place of where someone might usually have said _well_ , except Zak wasn’t a liar. Aaron didn’t look well. Not yet. He was working on it, but he felt it in himself, even if the mirror had been an unwelcome eye in the last few months. Not sleeping had caught up with him, nights out and drinking – he didn’t bounce back like he used to. That went for a lot of things, he guessed.

“How are you, lad? Really?” Zak asked, clear eyes focused on him. He leaned back in his chair, surveying Aaron the same way he would from his armchair at Wishing Well.

“Just…still swimmin’,” Aaron said, gulping a mouthful of tea around the lump in his throat, grief redirecting his body with detours and orange cones. He was the car crash. That much he knew.

“Aye,” Zak said, nodding, as if he knew what Aaron was talking about. Even if he didn’t get the reference, Aaron guessed he probably caught the gist. “That’s good.”

“So I’ve been told,” Aaron said, huffing without humour. It sent a ripple through the surface of his tea. Zak’s silence was tangible, the wind up towards him saying something a force Aaron could feel stirring next to him. It was like holding one end of an elastic band while someone pulled back the other – the pain wasn’t evident, but it was coming.

“You don’t have to act like – “ Zak paused. Reconsidered. “You don’t have to pretend like nowt has happened with me, son.”

“I’m not,” Aaron said, then tempered his defensiveness. “I’m not trying to, anyway. It’s been over two months – “

“You don’t have to pretend, I said,” Zak stared at him. “And that means, you don’t have to pretend you don’t know exactly how long it’s been either, to the sodding day.”

 _To the sodding hour._ It wasn’t even a calculation to be made, just a timer ticking over. A non stop stopwatch running and running over the minutes apart. Aaron was terrified of the day where it would stop being that automatic, when it would turn into a maths problem.

Robert was always the one who was good at maths.

Aaron nodded.

“We miss the people we’ve lost, lad,” Zak said, hands making firm, decisive gestures over the table.

“It’s not the same, Zak – “

“Do you get to wake up to him?” Zak asked, harshly, but not unkindly. A hard blow but blunt edged. “See him when you close your eyes at night? When you have sommat to say, some joke or opinion or whatever nonsense thing crosses your mind, when you turn to say it to him, is he there?”

“Shut up,” Aaron said, eyes burning.

“He was your heart, lad,” Zak said, the growl of his voice turned soothing. He gripped Aaron’s arm and Aaron found it hard to look at him, but he did. Saw something of his own face in Zak’s, and not in the parts that came from shared blood. It went deeper than that. “He was your heart, and the heart of your life, and he’s been taken off you. My Lisa’s been taken off me. It’s different alright, yeah, but it’s the same in the ways that matter – in the ways we can help each other out.”

“There’s – “ Aaron swallowed.

“Go on, son.”

“There’s no part of me that doesn’t have him in it, Zak. He was my whole life, and I’m meant to what? Start again?” Robert was a hole punched through everything. Home, the building and the village. The past, where all the things he touched, all the _Aarons_ he touched lived. The future, where everything they reached for together slipped from their grasp, Aaron left to try and catch smoke and vapour. And now. Now, he was the hole punched through Aaron, the breath stolen out of him when he was trying to go to sleep, the sudden, yet constant awareness that something was _missing._

Zak shook his head. “No, lad. I’m not sayin’ that. And I won’t pretend I’ve got an answer for you. I don’t know either, I don’t – “ Zak took a breath. He looked up at the fluorescents embedded in the ceiling, pupils narrowed to a point, the hairs of his bearded face cast in a high relief. He looked like a portrait of grief. A snapshot of a half of a pair. Aaron wondered if that’s what he looked like to Zak, to everyone. It’s what he felt like. A half. Less than – Robert would be quick to say Aaron was the best part of him but it worked both ways.

“Your _still swimmin’_ thing sounds like sommat that might do the trick, if owt will.” Zak drummed his hands on the table, lightly. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Don’t take much,” Aaron admitted. “Not down to you.”

“I just know that, if it were gettin’ on top of me,” Zak said, staring at the table. “Losin’ Lisa. If it were gettin’ the best of me I know you’d be there to share the load.”

“Course I would, Zak.”

“Well it’s a two way street, lad.” Zak looked at him fiercely. Determinedly. Boxing spirit, fighter’s eyes, he seemed bigger again. A flash of a younger man appearing inside the older, the tenacity of one and the more accumulated strength of the other, he was a pillar. Zak’s mental health issues, his time in hospitals, under the caring but all too present eyes of concerned Dingles – he fought demons that didn’t wear gloves, and certainly didn’t listen to the caution of referees. Aaron knew those demons. Knew them well.

“I get it,” Aaron said.

“I’ve made a right mess of this, haven’t I?” Zak palmed his face, rubbing from forehead to chin.

“It’s a mess,” Aaron admitted. “You didn’t make it though.”

“Fair enough. S’why you’re up here, in’t it?” Zak asked. “Instead of the village?”

“Just for a while. Trying to get my head right. For Liv, and Vic. Mum, when she’s back.”

“And you?”

“Head’s never been right for me, Zak, be realistic,” Aaron flicked his eyes at his uncle. Grinned, saw Zak take a short huff of relief before smiling himself, chuckling. Madhouse laughter, gallows humour – there were worse ways to cope and Aaron had been running through them fast. He wiped his eye, looked down at his hands, then over the table. His eye snagged on the crossword again.

He pulled the paper towards him, hand out for Zak’s pen. Zak dropped it in his palm.

_Shadow cast during a partial eclipse (8)._

_Aaron looked at the clue, hair rumpled and their tea cold at the bedside, but that warm glow stoked to a constant and enlivening fire inside him. He was sitting with his chin hooked over Robert’s shoulder, Robert slouched impossibly far down to accommodate their difference in height, propped up on the headboard together again. Aaron’s thighs bracketed Robert’s hips, and Robert stroked lazily up and down his calf, the bed sheet haphazardly covering his lower half._

_Robert filled it in. It was a word Aaron had never heard of before. He tried it aloud._

_“Mmhmm,” Robert hummed, idly filling in an easier clue._

_“Where’d you learn that, eh?”_

_“Dunno,” Robert said, scratching his temple with the cap-side of the pen. “Just one of those things I picked up. Never put it down again, I spose.”_

_Aaron huffed, Robert tilting his head against the puff of air on his neck, and Aaron laid a press of the lips at the junction between his jaw and his ear, Robert’s momentary tension uncoiling into nothing. He relaxed further into Aaron’s chest, the two of them spending the morning filling in little white boxes. Filling in gaps._

Aaron filled in the clue, Zak putting his glasses back on and peering down.

“Penumbra,” he said, wonderingly. “Cheers lad, never would’ve gotten that one. Where’d you hear of the likes of that?”

Aaron waited patiently for the tightness in his chest to loosen, for his smile to feel natural.

“Just sommat I picked up,” he said.

_I won’t put it down. I won’t ever put us down._


End file.
